Massacres in Virginia - and Iraq. An anarchist's reaction

CounterPunch presents:

A Momentary Glimpse into Daily Life in Iraq

Massacre at Va Tech
By SHERWOOD ROSS

At the memorial ceremony for those slain at Virginia Tech, President Bush said today he did not know what the victims had done to deserve their fate. How this nation wept as one when thirty innocent Americans perished and twenty more were wounded! There is almost nothing else on the television news but this tragedy --- not even news from the ongoing slaughter from the war in Iraq.

Here we have the sorry spectacle of the man in the White House who made the war on Iraq, where a disaster comparable to the Virginia Tech massacre occurs four or five times a day every day, leading the nation in prayer! Yet when does this man go on television to ask the American people to pray for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered in the illegal war he launched? And just as the students and teachers who perished at the hands of a crazed killer on the Virginia Tech campus had done nothing to deserve their fate, neither have the people of Iraq committed any crime to endure the unendurable they are suffering at the hands of a president who professed to be "horrified" at the events on a peaceful campus. If a South Korean student is regarded as a berserk killer for murdering thirty people what is President Bush, whose invasion to control oil-rich Iraq has cost nearly three quarters of a million lives, created four million refugees, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil?

The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. I have not gone to jail to protest the war machine, so I am no better than they and probably a good deal worse because I have given the issue some thought. How many of those parents in the audience hearing the President's words had elected to Congress men and women who voted for lax laws on gun ownership? How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president's illegal invasion of Iraq? Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our "gun culture" policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world's biggest arms peddler.

What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.

Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It's not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East "is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis" because three-million Iraqis have been "forcibly displaced" by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?

The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their "jobs" in their dreams at night?

All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as "good" people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.

America as a nation has become an organized nightmare. Yesterday, the nation woke up to the pain of the kind of killing it has been inflicting widely around the world since its fleets of bombers roared out to destroy Dresden, since it leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since it laid waste to Vietnam, since it overthrew Chile, and now since it has invaded two Middle Eastern nations in its thirst for oil. Yes, weep for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, who only wanted to study and live in peace. But weep also, America, for the people of Iraq! If President Bush cared as much for them as he cares for his own, he would have to hold four news conferences a day. He would never stop grieving.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist. For comments or to arrange for speaking engagements contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

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Choppa responds (to Stu who forwarded the piece to him):

Thanks!

Good stuff - but...

No class perspective. Democratic illusions up to here... ¨¨¨¨¨

He sees what power can do (not blind) but he doesn't see its material basis. Anarchist lack of understanding and perception of the levers of social reproduction and social change. Anarchist worship of and paralysis before the Big Gun. Like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake or a deer in headlights, he can't even call for a general strike by workers in the arms industry! He doesn't even call for a vote on any policy!!

What it boils down to is blaming the "ordinary American" for the political system and for supporting its priorities. No mention of the machinery to keep ordinary people in check. Guns in America are in the hands of the antisocial - baddies. Not a word about the cops, the scabs, the spies, the military at home. Not a word about history and the constant tug of WAR between workers and capitalists, both national and international. Not a word about the USSR (ooooold story). Not a word about US strategy against the Soviet bloc. Not even a word about Cuba or Venezuela.

In other words, too much distortion, too much garish contrast. A news item as impressionistic in its way as the Fox reports it mirrors from the other side.

Still better this than nothing!

But still - what a featureless landscape he paints between the juggernaut Bush and the berserk loner at VA Tech. An America populated by zombies and hoods.

Iraq 2007 = Siege of Leningrad 1941-44

This report is horrifying.

From today's Guardian/Observer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329749166-102280,00.html

How the good land turned bad
Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 18, 2007

[...]

The rehearsal space of Baghdad's Symphony Orchestra is in the capital's largely Shia Shaab district. Hassam al-Din al-Ansari, aged 64, the orchestra's composer and principal violinist, is in his office tuning his violin and improvising little arpeggios as he does. Like most in the orchestra before the invasion, he sustained his poorly paid musical career with another job, in al-Ansari's case as a deputy manager in the Ministry of Industry.

It is an oppressive day late in September 2006. The electricity, inevitably, is down. It has been out for 40 hours, one of the musicians complains. Without a generator to light and cool the theatre, the musicians arriving to warm up before rehearsing find themselves on a stage playing in a stifling gloom peering at scores lit only by a distant skylight. In the heat, the stage smells of sweat and dust and resin.

When it becomes too dark, the musicians abandon their efforts to use the stage and cram into the kitchen, which has windows on two sides. It is instantly a pick-a-stick of competing elbows, bows, flutes, music stands, cellos and French horns.

'We are challenging the situation,' al-Ansari says with a sigh, 'by trying to not be too far from the public. We are trying to put on a concert every month, but circumstances are very difficult.' So the performances that the orchestra do put on are private and rarefied, little events for a small audience who do not have to travel very far or have their own security, and put on mainly at the city's two subscription-only 'country clubs'. Other events are by invitation only, for government officials and diplomats from the Green Zone. Even Iraq's music has become gated.

The difficulties in assembling the musicians for rehearsal have led to another kind of fragmentation: of the very music itself. Complicated symphonies, al-Ansari admits, are too difficult to prepare, especially with no certainty that all the musicians will be able to appear. Instead, their performances are dominated by overtures, fragments of larger works and short pieces - Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. The war, too, has forced the orchestra to break into smaller units, ad hoc chamber ensembles more easy to assemble and to perform around the city when they can.

'We could just stop work. We could submit,' says al-Ansari, 'but we are determined to challenge the times we live in and to do our best. In the 1950s, we used to get a lot of Russian films in Iraq. We were just talking about this a quarter of an hour ago ... there was a film from the Second World War, from the battle of Leningrad, about the orchestra there that continued broadcasting on the radio through the German attack. The film showed different players and how they came to the concert and the difficulties they had because of the fighting. I feel,' he says with a sad resignation, 'we are living that old film.'

[...]

(My emphasis)

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A story from the siege of Leningrad (8 Sep 1941 - 27 Jan 1944)

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/leningrad.htm

"The Neva will start flowing upstream sooner than this city surrenders to the Nazis."

[...]

The peaceful life of Leningrad was interrupted by the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Germans had failed to capture the city in the first months of the war, therefore they imposed a siege on Leningrad. ‘Wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the Earth,’ was the directive of Hitler. ‘The defeat of the Soviet Union leaves no room for the continued existence of that large urban area. Finland, too, sees no point in the continued existence of that city so close to its new border... A tight siege should be imposed on the city and fire from all calibres of guns and incessant bombing raids should reduce the city to ashes...’

[...]

Besides their daily toil of defending the city, keeping its plants and factories rolling and tending to the wounded, the Leningraders were also writing poems and music. It was then and there that the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous Seventh Symphony that immediately became a stirring anthem to the unvanquished city on the Neva.

Refusing to leave the city with the rest of the Philharmonic Society early in the war, Shostakovich was bombarding the local recruitment centres with demands to send him out to the frontlines. All his pleas turned down, he then joined his friends digging trenches outside the city. After his attempt to join the militia also fell flat, Shostakovich signed with the local firefighters squad and, during his duty hours on the Conservatory roof, was putting out incendiary bombs the Nazis dropped on the city. It was during those trying days that he actually decided to write his larger-than-life Seventh Symphony…

In a radio message broadcast on September 20th, 1941 Dmitri Shostakovich said: ‘An hour ago I finished writing the second part of my big new symphony… Why am I telling you this? Because I want all the Leningraders who are listening to me to know that life goes on and we are all doing our duty…’

The Leningrad radio orchestra was now too small to play the Seventh Symphony though. The score called for 80 musicians and there were only a handful of them spared by famine and the enemy bullets at the frontlines... Then they made a radio announcement inviting the musicians who were still alive to join in. Unit commanders were instructed to dispatch their musicians with special passes, which said that they had been relieved from combat duty to perform the Seventh Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Finally, they all got together for the first rehearsal, their hands roughened from combat duty, trembling from malnutrition but everybody still clinging to their instruments as if for their own life… That was the shortest rehearsal ever, lasting for just 15 minutes because that was all the emaciated players could afford… And play they did and conductor Karl Eliasberg who was trying his best not to go down himself now knew that the orchestra would play the symphony…

August 9th, 1942 was just another day in the Nazi-besieged city. But not for the musicians, though, who, visibly uplifted, were busily preparing for the first ever public performance of the Seventh Symphony. Karl Eliasberg later wrote recalling that memorable day: ‘The chandeliers were all aglow in the Philharmonic Hall jam packed by writers, artists and academics. Military men were also very much in presence, most of them right from the battlefront…’

The conductor, his tuxedo dangling freely from his emaciated body, stepped to the pulpit, his baton trembling in his hand. The next moment it went up and the hall filled with the stirringly beautiful chords of one of the best music works Shostakovich had ever written in his whole life…

When the last chord trailed off there was a momentary silence. Then the whole place literally exploded with thunderous applause. Everybody rose to their feet, tears rolling down their faces, tears of joy and pride…

Buoyed by the deafening success of their performance and visibly proud of themselves, the musicians were happily hugging each other like soldiers after winning a major battle…

A German soldier who picked up the radio broadcast of that memorable concert was stunned by what he heard: ‘When I heard Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony being broadcast from the famine-stricken Leningrad I realised that we would never be able to take it. Realising that, I surrendered…’

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What can I add?

The most prolonged combat horror of World War 2 (not the most intense, perhaps, bearing in mind Dresden and the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki) is what comes to the mind of a musically cultured, westernized Iraqi trying to keep his international music and culture alive in wartime. This is an Iraqi musician playing western music for a westernized elite and the western invaders in a city and country undermined and infected by the Gulf War and Clinton's blockade ("500,000 kids dead, sure", said Fair-Price Albright), then smashed to pieces and turned into a constantly stirred toxic cesspool by the US and UK invasion and occupation under operation Enduring Imperialism. A man who would surely be among the first to welcome the western intervention against an oriental despot? An easy heart and mind to win. And yet...

He doesn't think of science fiction horrors, or Middle Eastern horrors, or ancient history horrors, or the Huns (the real ones), or Stalinist horrors. He thinks of the Nazi war machine attempting to reduce a great city to ashes.

Go Bush!

Go Blair!

Go hang.

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Ленинград - город герой

Leningrad - Gorod Geroy (Hero City)

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Some photos I took in St Pete a couple of years ago

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xjy/sets/72157594556340036/